"I first came across Marihiko Hara’s work in 2007, with his ‘Cesura’
release on the excellent Italian net-label – Zymogen. It really drew me
in more than most other work that was doing the rounds at the same time.
It had the sort of organic details and attention to beautiful subtle
developments that I had only really heard in offthesky and Nicolas
Bernier before (both label mates on Zymogen I should add). It became my
soundtrack to that year and an album I returned to almost daily during
the winter months. After this I followed Marihiko’s work carefully, from
his rather fantastic 2009 ‘Icon’ release on Cotton Goods to his recent
‘Prosa’ collaboration with Tomas Phillips on Tench Records.
I’m not entirely sure when we first got in touch or who instigated it,
but its been a few years now and seeing Marihiko’s evolution and careful
development has been a joy to behold. He then completely flummoxed me
when askingif I would consider releasing a heavily beat-led record. My
only prerequisite was that the beats were made organically, not just
some obvious drum machine or sample. Marihiko’s request came at a time
when both Ben and myself really wanted Home Normal to push on from its
comfortable surroundings that so many labels, artists and possibly
listeners for that matter, wish to reside – and keep things evolving,
changing and as such more meaningful for us. After averaging 10 or so
drone demos a day at the time, the initial mixes for Credo were sent. I
was in England in this period with Ben, tieing up the latest Home Normal
work. I recall that we were actually driving to pick up packing
materials and decided to make it a demo listening time and that we would
do ‘blind’ listens. At some point in the journey, Credo was put on and
the car journey ended up being far longer as we wanted to do repeat
listens. Amongst excited expressions over just how much we loved the
record, was a mutual agreement that this was exactly the kind of music
we wanted to put out, and exactly the kind of music which needed to be
heard by one of the most talented young producers around today."